Work isn’t all about fun and games, but QuizUp is trying as hard as it can to change that.
The popular and frustratingly addictive trivia game is announcing a new initiative today to change corporate learning with QuizUp at Work. The program allows corporations to take the fun and competitive nature of QuizUp and combine it with helping employees learn about company programs, products and policies.
I played a QuizUp match with its CEO Thor Fridriksson on trivia about my employer, TechCrunch. Thankfully I won, but just barely.
Thor told me that even when the topics take on a more corporate subject matter people are still excited about competing to win, now they’re just doing so with their fellow employees.
“Traditionally when enterprises are handing employees the manual of how to do things, it’s not exactly the most fun thing ever, it’s more of a chore,” Fridriksson said. “I feel like this is kind of the Holy Grail of corporate learning, you know, to make it fun.”
Fridriksson sees QuizUp at Work as a major opportunity for companies to show off their personalities and distinct corporate cultures to new employees while fostering connections among employees, as well.
“There are a lot of problems with modern companies; one thing is that they have a tough time engaging with new millennial employees that are coming on who are not used to the old way of corporate training,” he said.
Employers are able to easily see not only how employees are engaging with QuizUp at Work, but what individual questions they’re struggling with and what they have down pat.
QuizUp launched a redesign of its app this past May that heavily emphasized social networking features. Without specifying exact numbers, Fridriksson said that since releasing the update, the three-year-old company has nearly doubled the amount of daily active users that visit the app. No doubt an impressive feat for a game app that has been so popular for so long and now boasts around 70 million users.
To Fridriksson, QuizUp at Work was never a planned evolution of the trivia game’s brand, but he says it has felt like a very natural extension of the startup’s mission.
“We had this really stable technology that is about connecting people and quizzing them and doing it in a fun way. We had these social elements, the chat and the potential to explore and discover new people,” he said. “We just thought that this might be exactly what corporate learning really needs.”